For one Bremer County farmer, the drive is to create the world's best-tasting pork

Carl Blake (right) gets ready to turn the pig (All photos courtesy of Josh Holland)

For the past seven years 48-year-old Carl Blake of Fredericka has been working to breed pigs with the most delicious taste anywhere.

On Saturday night, Blake brought his "Iowa Swabian Hall" pork to the Courtyard and Cellar in Decorah.

Swabian Hall swine from Germany were named the world's best pork in 1832, and then again at the 1892 World's Fair.  Those pigs were the result of German King Wilhelm importing Chinese swine and crossbreeding them with the Russian Wild Boars that could be found in Germany.

Blake's version of the Swabian Hall swine crossbreeds fatty Chinese Meishan pigs with the more muscular Ossabaw pigs found off the coast of Georgia.  The richly flavored red meat is marbled with plenty of fat and has drawn national interest from the Food Channel's Andrew Zimmern and Comedy Central's Steven Colbert.

Courtyard and Cellar owners Nathan Matter and Benji Nichols offers the Swabian Hall pig roast as one of the incentives in their Kickstarter campaign to raise money to expand the Courtyard to include the cellar of the Armory.

Despite Saturday evening's rain, a crowd of 80 to 100 people came out to celebrate the expansion of the Courtyard and to get a taste of "The best-tasting pig in the world."

The finished pig